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" The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different. "

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" Florida is a very idiosyncratic place in a lot of ways - as are many parts of our fine country, but one could say Florida is particularly idiosyncratic. "

Laura van den Berg

Ways

Country

Place

" I've had a somewhat typical experience in that many of the contemporary writers I was exposed to early on were white and often male. "

" Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories. "

" I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don't see craft as just being technique - it's also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided. "

" Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation. "

" It puzzles me when writers say they can't read fiction when they're writing fiction because they don't want to be influenced. I'm totally open to useful influence. I'm praying for it. "

" Youth is such a fascinating and volatile concoction of vulnerability, dependence, restlessness, relentlessness. You're still learning the terms of the world and of the self, in a very immediate way. "

" In terms of specific cinematic influences, certainly I'd recommend 'Juan de los Muertos,' and I also really love this French zombie movie - 'Les Revenants' - where the dead reanimate for no apparent reason. "

" To me, in general, something that's really rich in terms of identity about transit spaces is that they're so intimate. Especially thinking about long international flights when we're trying to sleep on the plane - we're total strangers, but we're sleeping next to each other. "

Laura van den Berg

Identity

Rich

" I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you. "

" Children exist in the worlds that adults create for them, both locally and globally, and their options are, by virtue of age, often painfully limited. "

" I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, 'House Taken Over,' a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach. "

" I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling. "

" I do not work well when I am in living in a cyclone of panic. I reject actively seeking out destabilization and suffering as a creative model. "

" If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of 'material,' I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing 'Isle.' "

" Florida is a most unusual place. It can feel at once stifling and like anything is possible there. "

Laura van den Berg

Anything Is Possible

Place

" 'Find Me' I think, is brooding in a very literal sense of the word in that you have all of these sort of interior storm that's growing within Joy over the course of the book and leading her to her moment. And certainly, I think there's an aspect of the supernatural. "

" The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present. "

" When I first left Florida for Boston, I was so eager to shed my Floridian identity, perhaps some of my earlier surreal gestures felt hollow and unconvincing because they were not rising from the particular brand of the uncanny I knew best. "

" I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways. "

" As a reader, I appreciate a world that feels unsettled and also visceral, inhabitable, so that's a quality I try and bring to my own work. In this way, dislocation and precision make total sense to me as a unit. "

Laura van den Berg

Work

Quality

" Ever since I started writing in college, I have, save for a few short breaks here and there, been working away on something. I love it, I need it, and so it never occurred to me to put writing on the back burner. "

Laura van den Berg

Love

Need

" Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent. "

" Culturally, there is often the expectation that women should be repelled by anything too ugly, too violent. "

" I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world. "

" Being scared by a movie offers a safe catharsis, because the terror is confined to the screen. It's an adrenalin spike, and when I come back down, I feel a bit more leveled. "

Laura van den Berg

Back

Down

" If I'm really rolling with a short story, I work on it everywhere and end up with a finished draft in a couple months, but a novel really demands that I step out of my life and vanish into the world of the book. "

" A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem. But it's common enough to encounter a hodgepodge instead, where flashes of brilliance are undercut by clunkers. "

" The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are. "

" I think my favorite horror films are really grounded in human psychology, which is to say I think through sort of extreme dislocations of reality. "